TSA News

TSA admits not supposed to grope but does anyway

In an about-face from what the TSA has been claiming since 2010 — and from what hundreds of thousands of travelers have experienced — a TSA supervisor claimed the other day that TSA agents are, in fact, not supposed to use the front of their hands to grope passengers in a search, only the back of their hands, “unless there is a good reason to believe the passenger is hiding something.”

This admission came in a phone conversation with reporter Mike Mason of the local Fox-TV affiliate in Fort Myers/Naples, Florida. Mason revealed the conversation in a report he filed on June 19th.

The occasion for the report was an update on the case of Carol Jean Price, another in the list of victims who’ve been targeted by the TSA, arrested, and charged with assault for trying to protect themselves. Others include Yukari Miyamae, Andrea Abbott, and Phyllis Dintenfass. Mason’s report includes a video of Price’s search.

As a former TSA screener herself, Price claims agents are not supposed to touch a person’s genitals or breasts with their open hands. We called a current TSA supervisor to find out.

Mike Mason: “So you are supposed to use the back of your hand.”

The supervisor told me protocol states agents are supposed to use the backs of their hands to search sensitive areas unless there’s a good reason to believe the passenger is hiding something.

Yet in the next breath:

But nothing in the Port Authority’s report indicates Price was under any suspicion. Despite this, TSA officials maintain the pat down was “conducted according to established protocols.”

Since November 1, 2010 nationally — and since January of that year in the “test” airports in Boston and Las Vegas — we have been repeatedly told that the TSA’s “new policy” was to touch passengers’ bodies, including genitalia, with the front of the hands. Now we have a TSA supervisor telling a reporter that that’s not the case.

So which is it?

Significantly, the TSA doesn’t tell us on its website or blog. It merely uses the term “physical pat-downs” without describing what they entail.

And why, if there’s nothing wrong with the “physical pat-downs,” has the TSA ever considered revising them?

But maybe that’s all SSI. If so, that TSA supervisor who talked to Mike Mason is going to have a hard time explaining to his/her boss why this sensitive security information was revealed.

"Uncontrolled search and seizure is one of the first and most effective weapons in the arsenal of every arbitrary government. Among deprivations of rights, none is so effective in cowing a population, crushing the spirit of the individual, and putting terror in every heart." -Justice Robert Jackson, chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, 1949

*2015 UPDATE: Still no word from TSA on public comments* The public comment period on the TSA's electronic strip-search scanners and "pat-downs" closed on June 25, 2013. That public comment period had been ordered by the courts, an order the TSA ignored for almost two years before it finally complied. The agency must issue a report on the many thousands (or more?) of comments it received. Yet here it is 2015 and still no report. If the TSA ever complies with the requirement to issue that report, we'll let you know.

TSA News is an independent blog that covers the Transportation Security Administration. We are not affiliated with the TSA. Please send us an email with your news tips and suggestions.